Copy can be written, for your approval, that regularly connects you with your affiliates and can supply them with banners and links to use for promoting your business. For Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, virtual support can write social media updates that affiliates can use to advertise and promote. They can write examples of blog posts that can also be used to spread the word about your product.

By implementing a timetable, promotions can be scheduled and materials organised that will be required to run the proposed campaign.

A VA can manage your programme by supporting your affiliates, answering any questions and help them with any difficulties they may have. By keeping in touch with them by email they can provide tips to help promote your product. Contacting affiliates by phone, providing a personal touch, can help your team, knowing that there are real people within the business, there to assist them, in what can be a rather ‘lonely’ internet world.

A virtual assistant can run regular reports to check on affiliate sales and follow up with contact to them to help with promotion or congratulate on their performance!

Are you thinking of starting an affiliate programme for your business? You can email us here, or telephone and speak to Tamara, on 0208 468 8594.

They can find the best people to carry your ideas forward, those who are most suited to you and your product.

A VA can manage the team involved in the production keeping the project on track and moving forward. Ensuring the development doesn’t ‘stick’ at any point and make people accountable for various parts of the process.

Virtual support can review at a halfway point, to make sure things are moving in the right direction and proofread the finished article before passing on to you for your final approval.

With new products available, a virtual assistant can add them to your shopping cart and link them to your website for maximum effect (or provide the necessary link/s to your web developer.)

If the product is an electronic one, a virtual assistant can arrange for it to be delivered electronically after the customer has paid. Instant access to your product!

Following the purchase, a VA can assist with drafting text for a ‘thank you’ web page for your approval. They can draft copy for autoresponders for each item you have available for sale.
When copy is approved by you, a virtual assistant can implement and include relevant links for your product.
Virtual support can help you to consider the use of tracking links, identifying the links that are most effective and therefore the best ones to employ.

If your production is audio, a VA can transcribe and create a written product for distribution (or use a transcription service to assist).

If you have employed a graphic designer, virtual support can communicate with them to create the appropriate image for your product, suggesting ideas so that the image is matched to you and your product before your final approval.

When your offer is a physical item (CD, book, ) rather than an electronically available one a virtual assistant can research and set up the shipping of merchandise by a fulfilment house. They can then submit your products to enable shipping. Virtual support can draft copy documents to dispatch with the goods and submit for your approval.

Now you have your product and all systems in place for delivery to your customers, next week we will see how your virtual assistant can help with the public release and launch.

If we can help in any way, email us here, or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

How a VA can help - Shopping Cart Maintenance

If you have decided that you would like a shopping cart on your site to earn a passive income a virtual assistant can do all the jobs from the initial installation through all the integral parts needed to run an efficient system. Creation of autoresponders in your shopping cart for all your products, and various types of sign ups, webinar or teleclass a va can integrate into the system.

A virtual assistant can customise your cart with your logo, address and contact details and link your merchant account too.

By categorising product types, setting up shipping tables and creating coupon offers, your virtual assistant can run regular reports which will identify the products that have generated the most revenue for your business. This will allow you to tweak coupons or offers and offer other deals to expand their appeal to your customers.

Order forms can be customised for various products, making it easy for your customers to find related products. Your virtual support can review recurring orders and check everything is running smoothly (cancelling orders or refunding when necessary).

For your shopping cart,your virtual assistant can draft and create autoresponders, whether it is for products or webinar, and then help to decide on the timing of autoresponders.

Your support can create and place sign up forms on your website and ensure tracking links are set up within them, so that reports, when reviewed regularly, will show the parts that are working, enabling changes to be made to pages and content, if needs be.

Need to run a webinar?

Virtual support can help create a master plan for your webinar, drafting correspondence for the broadcast, announcements , reminders and follow up emails. Information will include date/time, time zones, topic to be covered and webinar protocol to be used.

A VA can set up a webinar recording so that after the event recordings can be sent to attendees (and others that had signed up but couldn’t attend, either because of the webinar being full or other commitments.)

They can answer enquiries from your audience and advertise the webinar on various social media platform. If the broadcast is a joint venture, your support can contact them to promote, together with ensuring that all communications advertise your webinar.

Before the webinar begins your va can provide you with details of numbers attending, summary of topics, questions that attendees have emailed that can be addressed during the webinar and recording details. After the event your assistant can post the webinar recording to your website, follow up with attendees, send audio recordings to people who were unable to attend, completing the cycle and build a database from the event for your newsletter,ezine or next event.

For more help or advise, email us here, or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594

ON24, a virtual event company, their research shows that between 20% and 95% savings are achieved when the event is a virtual one. When you realise it doesn’t just stop at savings made by attendees and all the travel and accommodation costs, the people who are arranging the event also gain from the ease and speed of arranging a virtual event, together with additional benefits of spending less time on the project.

In creating a virtual event you have produced a permanent record for future use, whether in a learning base, or for repeating at a future date to another audience or to re-purpose the information to use outside of the event.

A virtual event generates excitement, meaning extra customers and more leads. ON24 research reports that 4 to 5 times more leads are generated from a virtual event than from a physical one.

Your database of attendees will supply you with information of not only who attended but with any other information you wish to gather from them (eg. location) which may assist you in the promotion of your products.

Leads generated at virtual events are far more numerous than those made at physical events, with a neat database compiled as a bonus. Unlike physically collected names and email addresses a virtual event attendee will have always supplied a valid email address otherwise they would not be able to attend (and your report will inform you of who attended). A database from your virtual event informs you of which item your lead is interested in so you can promote that offer (about which you will have learnt everything possible!).

In contrast to the whirlwind of a physical event, where numbers and attendees to each specific part of the event are difficult to track and evaluate, the technology involved in a virtual event can report on numbers of attendees, specific areas of interest and sessions attended. Reports track and log your virtual event(s) showing who showed and what time they spent there. The ability to analyse their interactions with others, what they downloaded or viewed is a very useful tool, which can tell you about your audience.

Virtual event technology can provide you with valuable marketing data based on any criteria you or your sponsors decide upon. The genuine information provides you with information to target your marketing efforts. This can be a real time saver for you when you can ‘read’ your market.

Go green.… a fringe benefit, or it maybe one of your overriding objectives to run a ‘green’ company, using virtual technology to promote, teach or gain leads, ticks many of the boxes to help you achieve this end. The savings on fuel, travel, time lost to events, both attending and producing, compared to the physical event has to be of benefit both to you and your audience in helping to create a greener environment.

Some of our events that we have joint hosted on Eventbrite

Within Eventbrite you can list and promote your event, with analytics and data gathered for future reference.

Blog your business to success! Antonia Chitty of ACEInspire & Tamara Baranova of TJConsulting

Using Facebook to Create Business Success Monique Lester of London Digital PR & Tamara Baranova of TJConsulting Virtual Assistance

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Engaging your audience is a large part of staging a virtual event.

Let your audience determine your content. Make your content interesting and cover popular topics. Find out what your audience likes to do both on and off line. Produce your event so that the content is familiar and comfortable to them.

Promotion

Once everything is in place, event planned, sponsors on board, your twelve week time line gives you plenty of time to publicise your event.

Start your promotion 8 weeks before your event date. The ability to track your promotional activities (campaign tracking) lets you know just how well things are going. You can take immediate action if your promotion is not working.

10 ideas for a Virtual Event

For more information contact us by email or on 0203 468 8594.

With the increase in businesses and people using Facebook for marketing it follows that using Google Analytics on your Facebook business page is a must. There is no reason to treat your website any differently to your Facebook pages. To get the most from your investment in them, you need to know what your visitors are doing so you can make appropriate changes if necessary.

Facebook provides ‘Insights’ for your business page, these are useful but limiting. Statistics provided are limited to active users, daily likes, daily post views and daily post feedback.

Google Analytics provides a far more comprehensive set of information. Statistics will show specific page views, bounce rate and time spent on your site. You will learn where your visitors are located and which browser they use to find you. With all this knowledge you can optimise your pages and use to improve your marketing strategies. With all this knowledge you can change your website and Facebook pages to increase conversions and make more money online.

Google Analytics has built in automation so you can receive reports however often you like, direct into your Inbox. Then you can see where your visitors are spending there time and whether you need to alter pages to benefit from this information.

One of the limitations of Facebook fan pages is they can only run limited JavaScript. Google Analytics needs JavaScript code included on a page to correctly track visitors in the traditional way.  However, there is a new solution.  Using free and opensource FBGAT (Facebook Google Analytics Tracker), you can get Google Analytics working on your Facebook fan page. You may be able to install the solution yourself if you know HTML/FBML and have some experience with using Google Analytics.

Would you like to have Google Analytics added to your Facebook Business page? If so, please contact us and we can help.

Because the name and subject line may be all your prospects/customers see in their Inbox, it’s important that first impressions get across as much as possible to achieve higher ‘open’ rates.

Try different things:

Keep a common element in your emails, so even if some parts of it change you have consistency and don’t automatically get deleted when your email, in the main, goes unrecognised.

When you are trying to decide how much your product is worth, how your client/customer perceives your product goes a long way towards whether they make the decision to invest.

Under price and your prospective clients/ customers may think that your product is inferior in some way to it’s competitors. Overprice and you could appear to be too expensive with no extras to warrant the cost.

Many may equate low prices with a poor and inferior item or service. A little research into your market may gain you insight into what your clients/customers are willing to pay or expect to pay for a similar product.

Your customers will regard your product as valuable if it solves a problem for them. Rarity and scarcity of a product and 100% no quibble guarantee can improve your sales and let you price your product at a higher level.

If your pricing is too low you will find yourself working for very little revenue with no time or money to use to improve and develop your business. Get your pricing too high and you could lose out to your competitors when your prospective customers/clients deem that your product does not contain enough value for them to invest in.

Consider the value to your customers/clients and what impact the cost will have on their business.

Check out what your competition is providing in their package and what the market expects to gain from the product. Is there a way that you can fill a gap in the market and supply a product that no one else is providing?

Your pricing structure should be consistent with your position in the market. If supplying to the budget end of the market then low pricing will be essential where as if you customer is ‘high end’ then a low price will send out the wrong message with customers/clients perceptions tainted, thinking your product/service is inferior.

Research your market to determine the impact of your pricing and ascertain what percentage of customers will buy your product at a varying range of prices. Your costings should include a profitability factor so take account of fixed costs such as rent and salaries,the cost of your product to manufacture, making sure that these costs are well covered so you are not working for very little recompense.

What do you hope to achieve from your pricing structure, it’s impact on the market and your position within it?

When you have decided on your objectives the following may help with your pricing.

However you choose to price your product or service, take time to always measure the impact on your consumers of all of your marketing, using analytics to check what’s working best. With analytics installed on your website you are able to find out what your customers want and how you need to change to fulfill that need.

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In this fourth part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at SEO considerations for content. It is extremely important that you are familiar with keyword research, and I would recommend reading part 3 of this series (Keyword Research) to help provide a solid foundation.

Once you have identified your keywords you then need to implement them in the correct manner on your site, including in the user-facing content, and also the source code, or CMS for your site, (in the meta- data, header and other appropriate tags). Today we’re going to focus on content…

It is important to ensure that the keywords you have identified feature in your content. I mean… why wouldn’t they? Having your keywords in your content is the most natural thing to do, providing you got the keyword research stage correct. Although this will contribute towards ranking your pages for the terms you have identified; most importantly this provides a consistent user journey and helps to assure visitors that your page is indeed relevant for the query they have initiated.

Some SEO practitioners may advise you to consider and optimise your keyword density, (which is the number of times a keyword may be used in any given piece of content, expressed as a percentage of total content). Whilst having your keywords in your content is important, I would advise against this approach. Come on now – if all we had to do was drop your keywords a magic number of times then the web would be full of dull pages of auto-written crap. It’s not the 90’s anymore!

I strongly urge you not to obsess about an optimum density, and instead focus on writing relevant and attractive content for your users.

More on debunking the keyword density myth (amongst others)!

Also check out this excellent piece on “promotional vs informative” copywriting, from web copywriting expert Angie Nikoleychuk.

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

One option would be to integrate PayPal into your HTML/CSS website. It’s easy and cheap to do. Your payments will be securely processed by PayPal so you don’t need to worry about handling someone else’s card details. However the downside is that every time someone places an order for an ebook or a mp3 recording – you have to go online and send the customer the file or a link to download it. This will take time. And by no means the income, generated from such sales, can be called “passive”.

The other option is to use a shopping cart. Whichever system you are using at the moment to manage your website – WordPress, Joomla, HTML – there is a way to integrate a shopping cart solution. Some are free (like ZenCart), for some you need to pay a regular monthly free (like 1shoppingcart). However the system will handle the whole purchasing process on your behalf – from listing the products to sending a Thank You message.

The main benefits of a shopping cart over basic PayPal:

• Easier to update – you can add products & categories via an online control panel, image resizing is done for you, download links are automatically created for each product;
• Access it from anywhere – all you need is a web browser;
• Multiple payment methods already integrated – you may be able to use PayPal, Worldpay etc.;
• Automatic email notifications – you get notified of all new orders, your customers receive an automatic thank you message;
• Statistics available online, all in one place;
• You don’t need to have any technical knowledge of how to build a website;
• You can create discounts, multiple purchase offers, use affiliate schemes, send promotional emails to get customers to return and buy again;
• The purchase will get delivered automatically;
• You can create content pages to fully integrate the shopping cart into your site (or make your site as a shopping cart);
• The system will collate customers’ emails, so you can keep in touch and follow up;
• In most systems you can send a newsletter to your customers or integrate it with e-newsletter systems like Aweber, MailChimp or Constant Contact.

So very quickly you will be able to set up and manage your online store. All you need now is to finish off that e-book you were working on for a while.